Weeknotes (Through April 17, 2026)

Sunday, April 12th

• I've been working a bunch on the static site generator for al9000.com over the past week. It's coming together nicely.

  The biggest friction I have with it now is updating links when I move pages around. I'm working on an addition today that'll let me use a link("some-id") function to auto link to pages. It'll automatically pull in titles too. Either a short-title if it exist or title if it doesn't. Fallback is to the url itself. And, of course, I'll be able to override the title with custom text too.

• The other big thing I've been working on is the upgrade Multi-Player project that plays one video a bunch of times on a page with a brief delay between them.

  The original version use a separate youtube call for each of the videos. Given that up to 100 or so videos might show up based on your monitor size that could cause some issues with performance and syncing. I'm using a new approach that should only require accessing a video one time.

  I'm also changing the pattern. The first version played things in a linear fashion. Starting in the top left and going right and down until it hit the end of the page. The same behavior as the original page from years ago that my player is based off of.

  The new version puts the initial video in the middle column of the page a few rows down from the top. The delay for each video extends out from there using Manhattan distance (aka taxicab geometry).

  It looks way cooler.

• I had the new set up in place a few days ago. It worked great on Firefox and Safari, but Chrome took a long time to initialize. It worked fine after it got going, but the initial delay made if feel busted.

  I put about 20 hours into research to figure out how to address it. The key was finding this article from Axel Isouard written in 2016. It's where I learned I needed to remux a .webm file get Chrome to be happy with it.

  It took some more digging to find the mse-tools that includes the remuxer I need. That repo hasn't been updated in 6 years. That makes me a little hesitant, but it totally works.

  I'll be putting all that in play to finish up the new version of the player.